The thorny dilemmas that can be posed by efforts at architectural preservation are rearing their heads again in New York City in the case of a landmark building on Fifth Avenue that is considered to be the very model of Modernism. Almost 60 years ago, when the glass corner structure at 43rd Street was designed for the Manufacturers Hanover Trust, it broke all molds for bank architecture. No more shuttered fortresses with tight doorways and pillars of formidable stone.
It would be an airy, transparent building. A wisp. A luminous box with an unbroken glass facade that positioned its escalators and its impressive steel vault so that they would be prominent and visible through the windows.
Designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1954, 510 Fifth Avenue came to be seen as an important, historic building in the same league as modern architectural legends like Lever House and the Seagram Building.
But now preservationists and the city are battling in court over the building’s future. Preservationists say the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has abandoned its role as a protector of history and aesthetics to accommodate a powerful real estate interest. The commission says it has made reasonable accommodations for a new owner who wants to renovate the building.
The owner, Vornado Realty Trust, has, among other things, received permission to cut new doorways into the Fifth Avenue facade, to rotate the prized escalators and move them farther away from the windows and to reduce the vault wall. The plan is to create a space that can accommodate two new stores on Fifth Avenue.
“The resulting alteration totally obliterates the quality of this iconic structure,” said Roberta Brandes Gratz, a former landmarks commissioner who said she was asked to leave the panel last year to serve on a mayoral sustainability panel. “The interior is totally one piece with the exterior, both visually from the street and architecturally within. That has been totally compromised.”
Landmarks panels across the country have long wrestled with the delicate balance between preserving architectural history and fostering economic development, particularly during financial downturns when new projects can mean jobs. In New York, preservation groups have continually criticized the Bloomberg administration as favoring developers.
But in the case of this Fifth Avenue landmark, some say the building must be allowed to evolve. The landmarks commission’s role is not to lock New York’s architectural history in aspic, said Stephen F. Byrns, an architect who left the commission last year after completing his term. Rather, he said, “It’s trying to be reasonable and flexible in allowing a property to adapt.
“This is no longer a bank and there’s no longer a vault there,” he continued. “You can make doors out of glass that are almost seamless.”Though renovation has begun, preservationists have secured a stop-work order from the Manhattan Supreme Court judge who is hearing the case. They charge in the suit that the developer, abetted by the landmarks commission, has ignored restrictions set by the city to preserve the building’s interior character. Work is continuing, however, on the condition that any change must be reversible should the preservationists prevail in court.
Feeding the dispute are the preservationists’ concerns that the commission’s dealings with Vornado, whose many tenants in buildings across the city include Bloomberg L.P., the mayor’s company, have been too cozy.
Vornado hired a former landmarks commissioner, Meredith Kane, to be its lawyer before the commission. She was allowed to see and suggest changes to the report that the commission used to give the interior of the building landmark status earlier this year. And in a round of e-mails that the preservationists secured as part of their lawsuit, filed in July, they found one in which Ms. Kane asked that a hearing on designating the interior “be deferred until Vornado had its tenants in place” and another in which she asked the commission’s chairman, Robert B. Tierney, to reassure Vornado’s chairman, Steven Roth, that the commission would not block efforts to convert the property into retail space.